Strategic Intelligence: Gaming Sector Scorecard Q3 2025 Update

Artificial intelligence (AI) is fast becoming the engine for game development. Developers are designing AI-native games where worlds, non-playing characters (NPCs), and storylines adapt to player choices in real time. This enables studios to craft richer games with leaner teams.

Key Highlights

• Tencent (Riot Games), Valve, and EA introduced AI-powered anti-cheat systems in Q3 2025 to filter suspicious patterns like perfect headshots and adapt to evolving hacks. Riot Games’ Valorant and EA’s Apex Legends raised the bar with hardware authentication and biometric verification, locking ranked play behind verified identities. Matchmaking got smarter too with AI-based dissection of play styles and performance metrics to build fairer lobbies in Counter-Strike 2 and League of Legends, reducing toxicity.
• Meanwhile, game engines like Unity and Unreal Engine rolled out AI plugins that auto-generated textures, animations, and voice lines, thereby reducing production time. PEAK, a breakout survival hit with two million copies sold in nine days, used AI to craft dynamic worlds and lifelike NPCs. In addition, AI-powered localization tools enabled global releases without the need for large translation teams, helping games like Broken Arrow succeed in markets like China and Russia. AI is becoming a core driver of scalability, margin expansion, and intellectual property (IP) velocity, potentially driving a seismic shift in game development and competitive dynamics.

Scope

• This sector scorecard provides a top-down, comprehensive outlook for the key players in the gaming sector over the next two years, based on the key themes set to transform their industry landscape.

Reasons to Buy

• Companies that invest in the right themes become success stories. Those that miss the important themes in their industry end up as failures.
• The analyst's thematic research ecosystem is a single, integrated global research platform that provides an easy-to-use framework for tracking all themes across all companies in all sectors. It has a proven track record of identifying the important themes early, enabling companies to make the right investments ahead of the competition and secure that all-important competitive advantage.
• The analyst has developed a unique thematic methodology for ranking all major companies in all major sectors based on their relative strength in the big themes that are impacting their industries.
• First, we identify the top 10 themes transforming a sector across four categories (tech, macro, industry, and ESG). We also rank themes in order of priority by examining activity levels across 200 million alternative data signals, including patents, jobs, deals, filings, social media, and news.
• Second, we research each theme in detail, examining the value chain, key players, and trends. Additionally, we examine the impact of each theme across the 20 industries we cover. Our 200 million signals help identify the leading adopters of a theme in each sector.
• Finally, using our sector scorecards, we rank the companies most likely to succeed in a sector over the next five years.